Related papers: Can a One-Point Feedback Zeroth-order Algorithm Ac…

Zeroth-order or derivative-free optimization (MeZO) is an attractive strategy for finetuning large language models (LLMs) because it eliminates the memory overhead of backpropagation. However, it converges slowly due to the inherent curse…

The dual challenges of prohibitive communication overhead and the impracticality of gradient computation due to data privacy or black-box constraints in distributed systems motivate this work on communication-constrained gradient-free…

In this paper, we propose and analyze algorithms for zeroth-order optimization of non-convex composite objectives, focusing on reducing the complexity dependence on dimensionality. This is achieved by exploiting the low dimensional…

Bilevel optimization problems consist of minimizing a value function whose evaluation depends on the solution of an inner optimization problem. These problems are typically tackled using first-order methods that require computing the…

We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…

Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks, but their fine-tuning demands significant memory, posing challenges for resource-constrained environments. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…

To solve unmodeled optimization problems with hard constraints, this paper proposes a novel zeroth-order approach called Safe Zeroth-order Optimization using Linear Programs (SZO-LP). The SZO-LP method solves a linear program in each…

This paper provides lower bounds on the convergence rate of Derivative Free Optimization (DFO) with noisy function evaluations, exposing a fundamental and unavoidable gap between the performance of algorithms with access to gradients and…

$\ell_0$ constrained optimization is prevalent in machine learning, particularly for high-dimensional problems, because it is a fundamental approach to achieve sparse learning. Hard-thresholding gradient descent is a dominant technique to…

Large language models (LLMs) excel across various tasks, but standard first-order (FO) fine-tuning demands considerable memory, significantly limiting real-world deployment. Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization stood out as a promising…

Two-point zeroth order methods are important in many applications of zeroth-order optimization, such as robotics, wind farms, power systems, online optimization, and adversarial robustness to black-box attacks in deep neural networks, where…

Derivative Free Optimization is known to be an efficient and robust method to tackle the black-box optimization problem. When it comes to noisy functions, classical comparison-based algorithms are slower than gradient-based algorithms. For…

In this paper, we consider two distinct challenges in the resolution of nonsmooth stochastic optimization. Of these, the first pertains to the pronounced dependence of dimension in Gaussian smoothing-enabled zeroth-order schemes, impeding…

This paper focuses on the problem of \emph{constrained} \emph{stochastic} optimization. A zeroth order Frank-Wolfe algorithm is proposed, which in addition to the projection-free nature of the vanilla Frank-Wolfe algorithm makes it gradient…

We consider escaping saddle points of nonconvex problems where only the function evaluations can be accessed. Although a variety of works have been proposed, the majority of them require either second or first-order information, and only a…

Zeroth-order (ZO, also known as derivative-free) methods, which estimate the gradient only by two function evaluations, have attracted much attention recently because of its broad applications in machine learning community. The two function…

This paper deals with stochastic optimization problems involving Markovian noise with a zero-order oracle. We present and analyze a novel derivative-free method for solving such problems in strongly convex smooth and non-smooth settings…

Comparison-Based Optimization (CBO) is an optimization paradigm that assumes only very limited access to the objective function f(x). Despite the growing relevance of CBO to real-world applications, this field has received little attention…

Stochastic zeroth-order (SZO), or gradient-free, optimization allows to optimize arbitrary functions by relying only on function evaluations under parameter perturbations, however, the iteration complexity of SZO methods suffers a factor…

Recently introduced distributed zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) algorithms have shown their utility in distributed reinforcement learning (RL). Unfortunately, in the gradient estimation process, almost all of them require random samples…